


Stay Gold

by provocative_envy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Casual Sex, Communication Failure, Eventual Romance, Getting Together, Implied Sexual Content, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:01:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22307587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: Draco has a favorite brand of caviar, for fuck’s sake.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Charlie Weasley
Comments: 67
Kudos: 720





	Stay Gold

**Author's Note:**

> lmao

* * *

Charlie is twelve years old when he feels it.

A prickle.

A scratch.

A gentle, pinching, telltale ache spreading across his skin—across the back of his right hand, specifically—that it takes him a moment to register the immediate implications of. He drops the dirt-dusty baseball he’s holding, ignoring Bill’s increasingly far-off squawk of indignation, and fumbles for the worn Velcro strap on his glove, yanking it off with his teeth.

Sweat beads across Charlie’s forehead, dripping down his face before it can properly crystallize.

He stares at his hand.

He blinks the sunlight out of his eyes.

* * *

A smudged, dark blue almost-circle, formless and shaky, is scribbled just below his knuckles in what looks like thick, blunt-tipped Crayola marker.

Scent-free.

Washable.

* * *

It isn’t unusual, his mother reassures him while pressing her spatula down onto the sizzling, buttery top of his grilled cheese sandwich.

The age difference. Eight or nine years is practically nothing, in the grand scheme of things, not even a full decade, and all those eight or nine years really mean for Charlie is that he can be more—settled, when he does finally meet them. His soulmate. He can be more _sure_ about what he wants. More prepared. More experienced. More ready.

No one brings up how those eight or nine years might impact his soulmate, he notices.

* * *

The illegible scribbling continues for another six months, off-and-on, and while Charlie never writes back—never scribbles back—he does figure out that the almost-circle shape the kid keeps persistently trying to draw isn’t a circle at all.

It’s a letter.

A clumsily rendered “D” that can’t seem to decide if it’s upper-case or lower-case, feathered around the edges with childlike uncertainty.

Charlie almost responds, then.

Almost reaches for the chewed-up ballpoint pen jammed through the dented spiral spine of his English notebook—because you’re not supposed to do that, you’re not supposed to write your fucking _name_ , not before you’re eighteen, at least, and why hasn’t anyone explained that to this kid? Why isn’t anyone watching out for them?

Charlie is aware that it’s an arbitrary boundary—his own name isn’t particularly unique—but it’s not an unimportant one, considering the weight and scope and relatively modern power of the internet. Piecing together tiny, otherwise inconsequential clues to discover your soulmate’s identity is, in fact, an inexplicably beloved genre of romantic films.

There usually isn’t that much drama in real life, though.

Most people just exchange phone numbers and scrawl little hearts on their chests and get on with their happily ever afters.

* * *

Eventually, the kid—D—stops trying to write their name on their hand. Or their forearm. Or their wrist. Or their ankle, once, like they were stuck sitting cross-legged in time-out purgatory and couldn’t stop themselves.

There are no more aborted attempts at name scribbling, is the point.

There’s actually not much of anything. 

Not for a while.

* * *

Charlie is seventeen when he feels it again.

The flutter.

The _ache_.

He’s halfway out the front door, the keys to his dad’s ancient, groaning, rust-gnawed pick-up truck looped around his finger, a condom he stole from Bill’s room tucked behind the fake ID in his wallet. His jeans are new. His jacket’s borrowed. He’s running a little late. Still, he pauses in his parents’ driveway, just out of sight of the kitchen window, and hastily rolls up his right sleeve, bunching it around his elbow. And there, on his forearm:

_Hello._

The handwriting is different, obviously—mostly because it’s now _handwriting_ —and there’s a distinctly careful, meticulous hesitance to it, from the boxy print of the letters to the narrow, starkly black ink of whatever pen the kid used. It startles Charlie, because it looks like a decision, not an impulse, and that’s _odd_ , right? For a nine-year old? What grade is that, even—third? Fourth? Whichever grade Ron is in, or maybe Ginny, and isn’t Charlie kind of a piece of shit for not _knowing_ that? Off the top of his head?

Charlie’s phone buzzes impatiently from his back pocket.

His nostrils flare as he loosens his grip on his sleeve, an emotion that bears a striking resemblance to disappointment beginning to quietly carve out a pit for itself in his stomach.

English.

The word’s in English.

He’d always hoped— _wished_ —that when his soulmate did finally start writing to him again, it would be in a different language. A language that would necessitate traveling or exploring or planning a future thousands of miles away from—here. Home. He’d had dreams about it, sparkling white-sand beaches or blood-red savannah sunsets, towering European cathedrals or steaming-hot Brazilian rainforests or that big, famous mountain in Japan, snow-topped, volcanic; he’d have to translate D’s messages, learn to read and speak and write foreign, unfamiliar words, maybe even with a totally new alphabet, and it would be _expected_ of him.

He’d be doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing.

* * *

**hey**

_How are you?_

**i’m fine. how are you**

_I am also fine._

**cool. good talk**

_What is your favorite color?_

**red i guess. what about you**

_Green. What is your favorite animal?_

**lions. jaguars. cheetahs. big cats with big teeth mostly**

_I like chinchillas._

**ok**

_What is your favorite movie?_

**did you just google a bunch of ice breaker questions**

_Yes._

**monty python**

* * *

D is a weird kid.

They don’t write to Charlie every day—or even every week, or every month, or every three months—but when they do, it’s like they’re forcing themselves to. Checking a box on their chore list. Taking their medicine. They don’t ask Charlie what his name is, or how old he is, or where he lives; there’s a deliberately imposed distance, a formality, a wariness to their conversations that never fails to confuse him, deeply, because D is a _kid_ , a nine—then ten, then eleven, then twelve, thirteen, fourteen-year old kid, and shouldn’t kids be—funnier? Less serious? Less articulate?

Less _detached?_

Charlie understands the nature of obligation better than most people do. It’s an apple falling from a tree when it gets too big, a moonstruck ripple between low tide and high tide, a kind of basic, proven science, almost, a gravitational pull—something not quite tangibly physical but still unstoppable, unmovable, untenable, that drags you into an orbit you would never have chosen for yourself, not if you could help it.

Charlie suspects he wouldn’t have to explain any of that to D.

* * *

_Hi._

**hey**

_Are you busy?_

**no**

_Can I_

**?? can you what**

_I made a mistake._

**oh**

_I don’t know how to fix it._

**what kind of mistake**

_It doesn’t matter. Never mind._

**it sounds like it might matter**

_My father might be going to prison._

**whoa**

_And I thought I could make everything better but I just made it all worse._

**you’re sixteen. it’s not your fault**

_You don’t know that. Not for sure._

**that it’s not your fault your dad apparently sucks? yes i do**

_No. That I’m sixteen. You don’t know anything about me._

_Or my father._

_This was stupid._

_Is stupid._

* * *

Charlie goes to college in Texas and grad school in Florida and gets a job at a zoo in California bottle-feeding litters of serval kittens and—he worries.

Occasionally.

About D.

About his _soulmate_ , who’s finally eighteen but just as prickly and uptight and enigmatic and hard to talk to as they’ve always been. Charlie isn’t sure why they keep writing to him; what they get out of it, really, considering their pathological unwillingness to divulge any truly personal information about themselves. There’s nothing temporary about who Charlie is to them, about who they are to each other, but there’s so little substance to it—to their relationship, to their acquaintanceship, to their _whatever_ the fuck it is—that it never quite feels like it matters.

Charlie doesn’t think D wants a soulmate.

Charlie doesn’t think _he_ wants a soulmate.

And isn’t that a dangerous thought.

An exciting thought.

It sends a secret, illicit thrill rifling right through him, an electric charge, a spine-curdling shiver of goosebumps and adrenaline and teasing, taunting, tantalizing _temptation_ —because he’d grown up with a very clear idea of what having a soulmate meant, a very clear projection of what having a soulmate was _going_ to mean, and realizing that it might not work like that, that it might not _have_ to work like that—

It’s dizzying, the act of shrugging off that version of himself.

Intoxicating.

* * *

_Is your favorite movie still Monty Python?_

**you remember that?**

_Yes._

**is your favorite animal still a fucking chinchilla**

_Yes, actually._

**why**

_Why not?_

**they’re herbivores**

_So?_

**they’re literally just fancy rats**

_What does that mean?_

**like you put a rat in a fur coat and fed it a $30 salad**

_I’m not seeing the problem._

**the average adult male lion’s canines are 4 inches long**

_‘Tis but a flesh wound._

* * *

Charlie is twenty-nine when he starts sleeping with Draco Malfoy.

It’s not a _good_ decision, technically. Probably. Draco is Ron’s age, went to high school with Ron, in fact, and there’s enough genuinely bad blood festering between the two of them that Charlie did actually hesitate—for a few seconds, at least—before he responded to Draco’s Tinder messages. Sex is sex, though, Charlie reasoned.

Still reasons.

Is currently reasoning.

Draco has endlessly long legs and impressively high cheekbones and a cherry-red, deceptively soft mouth. He wears cashmere sweaters to dive bars. He smirks rather than smiles, automatically takes his shoes off before entering Charlie’s apartment, squeezes his pretty gray eyes shut when he comes—Draco is arrogant and petulant and _smart_ , so smart, and a little helpless, too, a little vulnerable despite his best and most vicious efforts to hide it.

Draco bruises easy.

Whines a lot.

Begs Charlie to leave marks, hickeys and fingerprints and scratches and dark, gouging indentations from his teeth, from his headboard, from the specially-ordered linen rope he knots around Draco’s wrists—

And Charlie listens, agrees, gives Draco everything he asks for as soon as he asks for it because the unfortunate truth is that Charlie _likes_ Draco. Likes him even with all the accompanying baggage. The extensive, transparent, deeply buried, mutinously guarded, utterly unrelatable rich kid baggage.

Draco has a favorite brand of caviar, for fuck’s sake.

* * *

_H_ _ow old are you?_

**old enough to be suspicious about why you want to know how old i am**

_You know how old I am._

**sort of**

_That doesn’t seem fair._

**“fair” is a weird way to describe any of this**

_That’s true._

**sorry**

_No, you’re right._

**i don’t hear that a lot**

_I don’t say it a lot._

**29**

_That’s how old you are?_

**yeah. that’s how old i am**

* * *

Charlie turns thirty and Bill sends him a care package from where he and Fleur are stationed in Scotland: a bottle of whiskey, two cans of haggis, an expensive-looking utility knife, and a six-month subscription to a dating website.

Draco comes over late, well after midnight, smelling like burnt espresso beans and woodsy designer cologne and stale library air. He squints at the leftover birthday cake in Charlie’s fridge, at the pile of embarrassing sex shop joke gifts from the twins, and then furrows his brow, the very tip of his tongue poking out from between his lips.

“Someone’s birthday?” he asks.

Charlie grunts and stretches his arms over his head, rolling his neck around, yawning into his shoulder. “Mine, yeah.”

Draco trails elegant, perfectly manicured fingers over a bottle of pumpkin spice flavored lube. His expression is—thoughtful. Considering. Carefully, coolly, cunningly neutral. “I didn’t bring you a present.”

“Why would you?”

“Because I wasn’t raised in a barn.”

“Neither was I.”

“Fine, I wasn’t raised _near_ a barn, is that better?”

Charlie grins, unabashed, dropping his arms so he can step closer to Draco. So he can lower his voice. “You know, I think you might like that about me.”

Draco huffs out one of his vaguely caustic, hilariously patronizing little laughs. “Yes, your inability to differentiate between a palate cleanser and a scoop of rainbow sherbet is _very_ sexy.”

Charlie reaches out to drag his thumb across the back of Draco’s hand, right below the bony ridges of his knuckles. The contrast between Charlie’s skin—coarse, callused, scarred, sun-freckled—and Malfoy’s—velvety, smooth, delicate, iridescently pale—is striking. Mesmerizing.

When Charlie looks up again, Malfoy’s cheeks are flushed a dark, dusky pink, like he’s been standing too close to an oven, or a campfire, or an open flame.

Scorching hot.

Blindingly bright.

* * *

_Do you have any pets?_

**nope**

_What about siblings?_

**yeah i’ve got a bunch of those. too many. you?**

_No._

**is your favorite color still green**

_Yes._

**mine’s still red**

_Those are complementary colors._

**red and green?**

_Yes. They’re on opposite sides of the color wheel. It’s very common for them to appear together in nature._

**_like a poison dart frog_ **

_What?_

**that should be your favorite animal**

_Oh, my god._

**they sell chinchillas at petco. i checked**

_So?_

**what about a snow leopard**

* * *

Draco is twenty-two and he is not Charlie’s boyfriend.

These are facts. Undeniable; irrefutable. Draco is filling out applications for law school and rabidly studying for his LSAT and forgetting to shave his patchy, wispy, barely-there blond beard and leaving crinkling, scrunched-up Red Bull cans on Charlie’s kitchen counters when he stops by to suck Charlie’s dick.

There’s a seemingly permanent ghost of him in Charlie’s bedroom, in Charlie’s _bed,_ that Charlie is a little afraid of.

A little intimidated by.

It’s the same feeling—cloying, heavy, otherwise indescribable—that he gets when he goes to scrub off D’s most recent messages, the grapefruit-scented lather of his soap stinging his nose, his skin, even as the water streams down to wash the words away.

* * *

_Hi._

_I know you’re probably asleep right now because you seem mostly normal and I think we’re in the same time zone and it’s four in the morning, so. Normal people are sleeping at four in the morning._

_I don’t expect you to write back right now._

_Obviously._

_Or. Actually. Please don’t write back even when you wake up and see this, like, hysterically mortifying word vomit covering your arm – and now your leg – stomach – whatever. I do not want a response to this._

_Okay?_

_Okay._

_Sometimes I think about writing my name or my address or my phone number on my hand – on your hand – like I know I should. I even pick up the pen to do it._

_I never do it._

_I’ve never been able to decide if that makes me a coward or not. Or – is having the impulse to do it at all the cowardly part? Don’t answer that._

_Any of this. Don’t answer any of this._

_I sound like a fucking lunatic._

_You’ve never done it, either, to be fair._

_Written what you’re supposed to, I mean._

_Maybe you’re a coward, too._

* * *

It isn’t that Charlie doesn’t think about D very often, because he does.

He thinks about D—not constantly. Not even close to constantly. A healthy amount. He thinks about D in terms that aren’t necessarily normal. In terms that aren’t possessive enough, or protective enough, or curious enough. Charlie has surmised that D is probably male, well-off and well-educated, with a mean streak that’s a bit too casual to strictly be a defense mechanism. He has a slyly understated sense of humor and the penmanship of a dead Victorian poet, as well as a conversation-crippling, not-insignificant talent for deflection. For _avoidance_. Charlie has yet to determine if they have anything in common, anything that might draw them together like two opposite-poled magnets, like two halves of the same whole; he doubts it, frankly. 

D is Charlie’s soulmate.

D is a fucking stranger.

“Do you have one?” Draco asks during dinner, in the middle of a crowded Thai restaurant. He has a speck of spicy peanut sauce on the corner of his mouth. Charlie wants to lick it off. “A soulmate, I mean?”

Charlie wrinkles his nose. “Uh. Yeah. Don’t you?”

Draco clicks his chopsticks together like a praying mantis getting ready to trap and eat its food. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m trying to gauge how severe your commitment issues are.”

Charlie chokes on a bite of chicken, swallowing roughly as he thumps his chest with his fist. “What? I’m— _what?”_

Draco’s gaze is shrewd. Sparkling. “Soulmates were an evolutionary response to human stubbornness. A biological failsafe to prevent our ancestors from dying alone in caves.”

Charlie reaches for his beer and takes a long, desperate gulp. “Jesus.”

“I’m not going to die in a cave.”

“No,” Charlie agrees faintly. “Definitely not.”

“Are you?”

“Am I—am I going to die in a cave?”

“It’s a metaphor,” Draco says, picking his own drink up. It’s a garish blue cocktail with a bunch of maraschino cherries floating on top. “The cave is where we all gain initial consciousness—it’s representative of the birth canal, actually, there’s about two centuries’ worth of literary criticism focused on that, although the use of the word ‘death’ in this context is somewhat misleading, of course, as it’s more of a reference to the French expression for an orgasm, ‘ _le petit_ —”

“Are you _fucking_ with me?” Charlie blurts out, incredulous. The lamp between them on table is shaped like a shiny ceramic tiger. “You are, aren’t you? You have to be.”

Draco just slurps at his drink, angelic, innocent, his lips ever so slightly curved up in a smile that’s so smug—so wicked—so _delighted_ — “You’re awfully gullible, aren’t you?”

Charlie heaves an exaggerated, long-suffering sigh, shaking his head, laughter already bubbling up; warm, fond, reluctant, disbelieving.

Deflection, though.

That’s what that was, wasn’t it?

* * *

_What are your initials?_

**why**

_I don’t have anything to call you. In my head._

**so you want my initials?**

_Yes._

**why not just my name**

_I don’t need to know your name._

**do you want to? know my name?**

_No._

**do i get your initials then too**

_Yes._

**c.w.**

_Oh._

**your turn**

**hello?**

**seriously?**

* * *

Charlie is tying off the condom and wetting a washcloth to clean up Draco with when he feels it.

The tingle.

The ache.

He glances instinctively at his right hand, to where the feeling is emanating from, but all he sees are thin, spidery shadows blending into the lines and calluses crisscrossing his palms. The only light in his bathroom is the rhythmically blinking green dot on the front of his toothbrush. D hasn’t written to him in weeks. Almost a month. D has been diligently pretending that Charlie doesn’t exist, and Charlie has been diligently pretending that it doesn’t bother him.

He turns off the sink faucet.

He can hear Draco shifting around in the bedroom, rustling the already rumpled sheets. Charlie holds his hand up to his toothbrush’s charging port, ducking down to read the message:

_What’s taking so long in there?_

It _is_ dramatic, it turns out.

In real life.

It’s really fucking dramatic.

Charlie freezes, his balance wavering on the chipped tile floor, and then he inhales sharply, a jagged, punched-out breath that he doesn’t even _hear,_ can’t even hear, because what must be—can’t be—all the blood in his body is rushing to his head, tunneling between his ears, loud like a waterfall and twice as deadly. Twice as terrifying.

But Charlie has always had a bit of a backwards relationship with fear.

Images, snapshots, memories—inviting Draco over to watch _Armageddon_ so they could make fun of the plot holes and then leaning over to kiss him halfway through the opening credits because it felt imperative, it felt important, it felt _necessary;_ watching Draco tentatively chew a forkful of the eggs Charlie had scrambled with beer instead of milk, like Bill taught him to, and then howling with laughter when Draco had gagged and grimaced and spent twenty minutes trying to bitch while he gargled a Costco-sized bottle of Listerine. 

There hadn’t been any magic. 

None of it had looked like destiny. Like fate. There was no instant, easy understanding between them, a slew of whited-out warning signs, detour signs, that they both _knew_ how to read, fundamentally, tacitly, instinctually. It wasn’t like that.

But—of course.

_Of course_ it’s Draco.

Charlie walks back into the bedroom in—not a _daze_ , he’s too focused for that—but in a kind of fog, almost. Like he just has to be patient for a little while longer, and the weather will go back to normal. Sunny. Temperate. Clear. Blue skies and warm asphalt and those dumb fucking golf course chic salmon-pink chinos Draco wore to brunch once. Boat shoes. No socks. A watch that worth more than Charlie's truck hanging loosely, carelessly, from his fragile, angular wrist. 

Of course.

Now, Draco is studying Charlie intently, a single imperious, expectant eyebrow raised. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” Charlie says, and the visible tension in Draco’s shoulders, in Draco’s _posture_ , it bleeds out. Relaxes. “I just—”

“What?”

Charlie puffs his cheeks out, forehead creased in a frown. “It was a joke, right?”

Draco flinches. “ _What?”_

“No, no, not—” Charlie gestures to the writing on his hand. On Draco’s hand. “Not that. That’s—that’s cool. Fine. Perfect. You’re perfect. I meant—the chinchilla thing.”

“The chinchilla thing,” Draco repeats slowly. There’s a twitch—a glimmer—of something in his eyes. Amusement. Affection, begrudging and a little relieved. “You think I’ve been joking about liking chinchillas for _thirteen_ years.”

“It’s the only explanation.”

“It _really_ isn’t.”

Charlie climbs back up onto the bed, settling next to Draco, dropping the damp washcloth on the flat of his lower abdomen, where he’s sticky with come and lube and saliva, and then nudging him in the side. There’s a pen on the nightstand, one of Draco’s, a ridiculous, platinum-accented marble green pen with an ergonomic grip.

Charlie leans over to grab the pen.

He uncaps it with his teeth, contorting his arm and his torso and giving himself a double-chin, probably, as he looks down at his chest and starts to write, messy and lopsided and uneven and—shaky. The words, the numbers, all of it. They wind from just below his collarbone to the middle of his sternum, looping around his left nipple. When he’s done, he puts the pen back on the nightstand.

And Draco—

Draco goes very, very still, and very, very silent.

He’s staring at his chest—his own chest, not Charlie’s—with an odd expression on his face. Wistful. Conflicted. Yearning. _Awed._ His lips are parted, bruised red, and the narrow point of his chin is trembling, slightly, like he’s cold, like he’s overwhelmed, like he can’t control it. Like he doesn’t know how to.

“I already have your phone number,” Draco finally says, his voice cracking. Raw. “And your address. And your name.”

Charlie shrugs, feigning nonchalance, rubbing his thumb along the sleek black waistband of Draco’s underwear. He still hasn’t cleaned himself up. The water from the washcloth is dripping down, pooling in the hollows of his hipbones, streaking his ribs, his waist, the bite marks Charlie made sure to leave behind.

“Not the little heart, though,” Charlie says, and he’s surprised by how nervous he is; by how hard his actual heart is pounding, like he’s been running and running for so long, for too long, for long enough that his muscles went numb and his legs went rubbery and he forgot, mostly, how to fucking _stop._ “The little heart is totally new.”

Draco snorts at that—not quite a laugh, but definitely laugh-adjacent. He’s smiling, too, small and decidedly private, decidedly sincere, and the sight of it has Charlie pressing closer.

Impossibly.

Skin to skin to skin.

* * *

_What the fuck is on the coffee table?_

_Is that a rodent cage?_

_??????????????????_

_Charlie._

_Light of my life._

_Oh, my god, it smells._

_Is that a fucking SQUIRREL?_

_Why does it have a litter box?_

**happy anniversary baby his name is norbert**

**he’s not going anywhere**

_Why not?_

**chinchillas can live for like ten years**

**we're in it to win it**

**100% committed**

**that's our new child actually tell your mom we finally adopted something**

**love you!!!!!**

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> [come join me in hell](http://www.provocative-envy.tumblr.com)


End file.
